Welcome to the world news guide, guardian.co.uk's country-by-country selection of the best news sources on the world wide web.

The guide lists news and government websites for every country in the world. We include the major online news operations - not least guardian.co.uk - which offer up-to-the-minute breaking news and analysis. But we also link to smaller sites such as the Zimbabwe Independent, which brings analysis of life in Harare to a global audience, and Dawn in Pakistan, which carries daily news on the war in Afghanistan on one hand and tensions with India on the other.

The directory links to almost 1,000 sites in all, and is a guide to some of the very best news reporting in the world.

The guide is selective. But while many countries have hundreds of news websites, others have only one or two: so the quality of site we include from, say, Cyprus doesn't match that of many we exclude from the US.

Just because we link to a website, it doesn't mean we espouse the points of view within it, or even necessarily like it - we just think it is an important source. So, we include government mouthpieces such as the People's Daily (China) and the New Light of Myanmar (Burma) alongside more objective sources. If you have any comments on our choices, please email us at weblog@guardian.co.uk.

There is a bias towards sites in major European languages - particularly English, French and Spanish - so if you know a site we should have included in another language, please let us know.

When we link to a site, we include a short write-up saying what we thought of the site when we saw it. This write-up will usually include the language of the site, and whether any special software (often Adobe's Acrobat Reader) is necessary to view it. Some sites we explicitly recommend, but again we do not necessarily agree with the views they express. Again, if you have any comments on what we have said, or if anything is out of date, please tell us.

Finally, politics. Countries are defined according to the current list of UN member states - so you will find East Timorese sites listed within Indonesia, and the Palestinian territories within Israel. If or when the UN list changes, we will change the guide. The only exception to this rule is territories outside the continent of the mother country: Guam and the Falklands both have their own pages. Continent definitions are also a minefield; we folllowed generally accepted convention, but still ended up with the absurdity of listing the Vladivostok News in Europe. It was either that or have the St Petersburg Times in Asia, so please forgive us. If it really bothers you, let us know.